Infinite amount of monkeys playing chess

Wouldn't having an infinite amount of monkeys sitting around infinite chess boards only result in an infinite amount of poop and chess pieces being flung through the air?

I mean really, what would there be to motivate them to sit politely as a chess board for hours and gently move pieces about when they don't even have a clue what the purpose is?

number....how far can it go ? edit: sorry DC-poc has already give the answer.

Well, yes, there would be a lot of that as well, but somewhere in the melee would be a masterpiece.

I mean really, what would there be to motivate them to sit politely as a chess board for hours and gently move pieces about when they don't even have a clue what the purpose is?

Two bananas for the winner, loser gets to clear up the poop.

But honestly, this is like saying that if you entered an infinite number of fat people in the Iron Man Triathlon, then one of them would eventually win. But that is wrong! None of them would win, because they'll always be too out of shape, no matter how many fat people you throw into the contest!

Just because you have an infinite number of something, that doesn't guarentee that anything productive will get accomplished!

But by the time they 'evolved' to get smart enough to gently move the pieces around for hours instead of flinging poo, then could they still be considered monkeys? Aren't really smart monkeys considered humans (or psuedo-humans)?

And besides, doesn't giving them intelligence defeat the entire purpose of the original hypothesis anyways? I mean heck, if it was ok for them to suddenly become smart then why not just substitute an infinite amount of humans instead, and save yourself several millions of years waiting on evolution.

Yes, it's good to focus on the practicalities of such a proposal.  Back to the drawing board, I suppose....

They would play all the possible games of chess in exactly the time it would take to play each game.

Infinity is so great.

Eventually you would have a Triathlon where all the other contestants had accidents (like breaking a leg) and a fat person would win. I remember when a 100 to 1 shot won the Grand National. There was a big pile up at one of the obstacles. The winning horse was so far behind that everything was clear when he made it to the obstacle.

As a follow up question, would an infinite number of monkeys cleaning up an infinite amount of poop eventually write a Dan Brown novel on the walls with it?

I think only a few monkeys in a short period of time could manage that.

 Infinity is a concept (like god possibly). It is for a number that is so big we cannot imagine it. No one can ever prove that it exists but it is a very useful concept in physics/etc.

For example summing to infinity in a convergent series is the only was to show it will be a finite number. Hope that helps.

Infinity is not a number. It is a limit. Thinking of infinity as a number can lead to a lot of false conclusions. The number of points on a line is an example of something that is infinite.

Where would these infinite number of monkeys live?  Even if  you covered all the land masses of earth to a depth of one hundred feet with monkeys it would still not be an infinite number of monkeys. How much time do we give the monkeys to do their thing? They calculate that the universe is only so many billions of years old. A very large number of years but not infinite.

Maybe if you covered all the land mass on earth to a depth of 112 feet with monkeys then?

Also put some out to sea on rafts with chess boards.

That should shore up the number just enough to make it work I think.

The question is whether there is a finite number of possible things that can happen in this universe or an infinite number.

If we say there is a finite number of things that could happen until everything has happened (and this isn't just chess moves, this is down to the exact milimeter of a square on a chessboard) then it will repeat infinite times.

If we say that there is an infinite number of things that could happen (although there is a finite number of chess moves, you could move a piece slightly to one side of a square in chess), then although it might appear that they are recreating the game an infinite number of times, there is only a finite number of times when the game would be exact. This finite number could be any natural number between 0 and the highest finite number that is not infinity (which we cannot perceive).

The monkeys would probably prefer to work on fermat's-last-pizza puzzle.

Actually working on the old principle of monkey see monkey do, I am betting the monkeys would start copying each other.  Either that or they would end the whole experiment with a giant poop-throwing fight.